KIRKUS REVIEW

First
published in 1920 and set 17 years earlier, Gronemann's newly translated novel
blends satiric humor and an eerie sense of foreboding in relating the efforts
of European Jews to assimilate at a wildly contentious and confusing time.

Drawing on
his own experiences, Gronemann focuses on two very different characters heading
down two very different paths. Heinz Lehnsen is a well-trod regional court
director in Berlin who changed his last name from Levysohn after having himself
and his family converted to Christianity. Yossel Schlenker, Heinz's distant
cousin, is a Talmudic scholar from the Russian shtetl of Borytshev who finds a world
of new possibilities in bustling Berlin after immigrating there with his new,
free-willed wife, Chana Weinstein. After an encounter with Yossel in Berlin,
the conflicted Heinz, who “had never had anything Jewish around him," has
his interest awakened in his disavowed roots. He travels to Borytshev, where,
his Christian "cover" blown, he gets swept up by, but survives, an
anti-Jewish pogrom. Written at a time when the new Weimar state was promising
at least a whiff of democracy, the book holds out a certain promise for
European Jews. With slippery, larger-than-life characters like Chana's con man
father, whose schemes include writing "schnorrer letters" to solicit
money from poor people who think they're contributing to a cause, Gronemann
suggests there will be no keeping his people down. But with each cruel and
offhanded denunciation of Jews and their Zionist dreams, and each cold
reference to their past trials—"How was it even possible that there were
even still Jews!" ponders Heinz—the book augurs unspeakably dark times
ahead.

A free-wheeling
Jewish comic novel before its time, this artfully contained commentary on
Jewish life in Europe in the early 1900s makes a welcome reappearance.

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